MODERN LOVE; Dear Editor, The Secret Of Love Is

By DANIEL JONES

Published: February 11, 2007

EACH year, as the day nears when we are expected to celebrate (or at least positively spin) the current state of our romantic lives, people start asking me what I, as the editor of this column, have learned about love. Surely, they assume, I've learned something from spending my days immersed in strangers' relationship stories. But whenever this seeming softball of a question comes hurtling at me, my mind goes blank.

In need of an answer, I sift through hundreds of essays submitted for the column, searching for trends, clues, even a measly tip or two. This year, I relived the oddity of the middle-aged woman who couldn't decide when best to inform her dates that she's never had sex, and of the man who faced a similar quandary when it came to disclosing that he has only one testicle. I read cheery stories of those who found love only after giving up, and darker tales of philandering husbands, rebellious children, stalking lovers, flirtatious doctors and baffling breakups.

In these accounts I found exactly one common thread: Wisdom about love is sorely lacking. Over the millennia we Homo sapiens, with our ever-evolving intelligence and sensibilities, have made great strides on many fronts (human rights! space travel!), but when it comes to love, we don't seem to evolve so much as revolve.

Given this history of futility, maybe we should stop asking each other what we have learned about love. The better question is: In what new and creative ways have we failed to learn? That I can answer. So here, with gratitude to the thousands of writers who every year send me their confessions of doubt and disorder, I offer my thoughts on those areas where we have made no discernable progress in learning about love since last Valentine's Day.

1. HOW TO AVOID FEELING JEALOUS OVER REALLY DUMB THINGS

This year I heard from several wives who claim to be jealous of the relationship their husbands have with the woman's voice on the car's navigation device. Not only is it strangely seductive and somehow more sophisticated than the wife's voice, it also provides flawless directions, an ability it unfairly flaunts to gain the husband's admiration and trust. How, these wives wonder, are they supposed to compete with a dashboard dominatrix who has her own built-in Global Positioning System? And how are they to feel when their husbands shush them so they can better hear the advice of their leather-bound mistress of the console?

2. HOW TO REMEMBER THAT WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE

Online communities like SecondLife allow members to create animated versions of themselves called avatars that can go on dates, fly, carouse, even engage in prostitution. Theodora Stites wrote vividly in this space about how she conducts much of her romantic life this way and confessed to enlarging her avatar's chest and perfecting its features to attract suitable male avatars.

You might assume that on SecondLife you are protected from the emotional upheaval of real relationships because the animated couplings tend to be, well, fake. But here's the catch: They're not fake. It's still you behind the screen and you who is being accepted or rejected, with all the attendant joy and pain. As Theodora explained, ''I've found that I act much as I do in real life, and my SecondLife relationships tend to fail the same way my real-life relationships do.''

3. HOW TO EMBRACE THE NO-FAULT BREAKUP

There surely is plenty of blame to go around in most breakups, but that's not the way we tend to see it. We tend to believe only one person is at fault. The other person. Especially when that person is a man. Please don't shoot the messenger on this one; I'm simply telling you what I have observed.

Among the truckloads of divorce and breakup stories I've received, the prevailing sentiment is that the man is either at fault or too incommunicative for fault to be properly established. What's more, even the men blame the men.

''He was a jerk,'' the women say. ''He didn't know what he wanted.''

''I was a jerk,'' the men say. ''I didn't know what I wanted.''

Can the world actually be this tilted, or is that just how we choose to write about it? Are women apt to publicly seethe while men prefer to seethe in private? Or is it more acceptable for women to complain about men than the reverse? If you know the answer, send it to modernlove@nytimes.com, and together we'll bust this case wide open.

4. HOW TO HAVE SEX IF YOU'RE A SEX COLUMNIST

This seemed to be the year of hearing from sex columnists who aren't having sex. In case you didn't know, it's really embarrassing to be a sex columnist who isn't having sex. The anxiety is three-fold: First, what am I supposed to write about if I'm not having sex? Second, how am I supposed to have any credibility? And third, why is this happening to me, anyway?

5. HOW TO FIND A LASTING RELATIONSHIP FOR YOURSELF IF YOU'RE A DATING COACH

Same as above, substituting dating coach for sex columnist and dates for sex.